Agitating doctors open for talks with WB CM Mamata, but will decide venue later

New Delhi, June 16: The medicos across the country continued their ongoing strike on Sunday and said that they are ready to meet West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee but the venue of the meeting would be decided later.

Agitating junior doctors in Kolkata on Saturday turned down Chief Minister's appeal to end their stir and resume duty, saying there was no honest effort on her part to break the deadlock.

The agitating junior doctors also rubbished Mamata Banerjee's claims that a few of their colleagues visited her at the state secretariat. At the same time resident doctors of AIIMS have withdrawn their strike on Saturday. All the resident doctors have returned to their work, but will continue to oppose the phenomenon in Bengal.

To show their support, doctors at AIIMS will work with wearing black strips and helmets. They will again go on an indefinite strike from June 17 if the situation does not improve.

The Ministry of Home Affairs issued an advisory seeking a report on the stir. But she reacted sharply to it and said such advisory should be "sent to states like Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat where several murders are reported since the last couple of years".

The strike began on Monday night when two junior doctors of NRS hospital were injured in an attack by relatives of a patient, who died.

Banerjee said, on Friday, she "waited for the junior doctors for five hours. And today, I cancelled all my programmes for them. You must show some respect to the constitutional body".

On the mass resignation of the doctors across the state, she said it was not legally tenable.

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan asked states to consider enacting specific legislation for protecting doctors and medical professionals from any form of violence in the wake Bengal assault on junior doctors.

Patients in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and many other cities faced hardships as the protest by doctors, in solidarity with their striking colleagues in Bengal, continued in several government hospitals.